Artist Talk

ARTIST TALK 1.

As an artist I, we go thru this self exam that never stops. I once studied mono printing from a Lakota Artist, Roger Broer. He wrote:
“We exam our work….the value of our creations are for what meaning, what is the importance of my ideas, inspirations, where is it all going? Does anyone care? Maybe I just do not have the gifting.” These exams can be discouraging to think about and can throw us into a liminal space which is not all bad. I find myself in that liminal space today and not for the first time. A space especially after finishing a big project of questioning my driving purpose, where my soul cries out for more meaning. With a lot of patience, waiting, listening I have found that new birthing do come.

In this soul searching space I found an article by Ron Rolheiser a Jesuit Priest on the real challenge in creativity that spoke to me.
You can read the whole article on line by looking up THE REAL CHALLENGE IN CREATIVITY February 3, 2014
www.ronrolheiser.com

Here are some excerpts from the article.
“What a good artist does, whether that be a singer, a writer, a painter, a dancer, a craftsperson, a carpenter, or a gardener is tap into the deep energies at the heart of things and draw on them to create something that is of God, namely, something that is one, true, good, and beautiful. In the end, and this is true of all good art and all good performance, creativity is not about the person doing the creation. It’s about oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty.
This holds true for all creativity. At the end of the day, it has to be about truth, goodness, beauty, and God, not about oneself or one’s audience.
We often do not create because we fear that what we will produce will be too unprofessional to stand out in any way or to measure up in a way that it can be published or exhibited publicly so as to receive recognition and honor. And so, mostly, we mute and hide our creative talents because we cannot do what the great ones do. We punish ourselves by thinking this way: If no one will publish it, no sense writing it. If nobody will buy it, no sense painting it. If nobody will admire it, no sense doing it. But that’s the wrong idea of creativity. We are meant to create things, not because we might get them published and receive honor and money for them. We are meant to create things because creativity, of all kinds, has us enter into the deep center of energy at the heart of things. In creativity we join ourselves to God’s energy and help channel God’s transcendental qualities: oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty. Ultimately, it isn’t important that what we do gets publicly recognized, gets published, or earns us a monetary reward. Creativity is its own reward. When you act like God, you get to feel like God – or, at least, you get to feel some wonderful divine energy. At the end of the day, it has to be about truth, goodness, beauty, and God, not about oneself or one’s audience.
We are creative for our souls, to enter a divine dance, to connect ourselves to the heart of things.
Sometimes we cannot save the world, but we can save our own sanity and help bring God into the world by nurturing our own souls.”

I found this article to be encouraging, to be kind to myself and stay in the divine dance.